I’m looking at you, looking at me

How do machines see us? This question has been carefully slipping through several areas of production and research during the past couple of decades. From James Bridle’s Tumblr blog the New Aesthetic where he has built a collection of images that, in his words, “makes fun, I mean critiques, the new ways of seeing the world, an echo of the society, technology, politics and people that co-produce them” or the vulnerability of technology as seen by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez in, another Tumblr blog, Algopop, where he collects how certain algorithms hilariously fail to deliver what they’re expected to, we can see an essential need to understand the processes led by black boxes. By ‘black boxes’ here I mean “a usually complicated electronic device whose internal mechanism is usually hidden from or mysterious to the user” (Merriam-Webster 2019) – and, with this, I’m commenting on those who code, train, build these mechanisms and how this translates into what happens outside of the screen.